Designing professional development systems to support the Common Core State Standards in mathematics

This report, Scaling Up Professional Development in an Era of Common State Standards, describes the process and outcomes of a project aimed at bringing together a set of diverse experts to generate a set of design recommendations for what should be considered when creating, sustaining, and assessing professional development systems to support the Common Core State Standards in mathematics. The work of initiating and supporting collaboration among scholars from diverse fields to generate a set of recommendations for professional development was guided by three questions:

1. How can current knowledge from existing research be best used to design and deliver high-quality, effective mathematics professional development at scale, addressing both the CCSSM content and practices?

2. How can different fields of knowledge such as mathematics, mathematics education, policy studies, and systems research contribute to addressing the emergent national need of providing high-quality, effective mathematics professional development at scale?

3. What are meaningful ways of assessing the progress in implementing high-quality professional development and systematically communicating that information to providers?